Family Sues Funeral Home Over Storage of Boy’s Ashes

SANTA ANA — A family filed suit Wednesday against Melrose Abbey Funeral Home in Anaheim, alleging that their son’s ashes, which they sought to retrieve after 35 years, had been commingled with others.

Sandra Grace and her daughter Jennifer Grace, both of Fullerton, say the ashes of Shayne Michael Turner, who died in infancy, were stored in decaying cardboard boxes strewn with hundreds of others in a dirty crypt.

Kristine Nelson, Melrose Abbey general manager, said Wednesday that 35 years ago, ashes that were not claimed by the families were stored in cardboard boxes, which deteriorate. Today, she said, they are stored in plastic urns.

When bodies are cremated, she said, families have the choice of taking the ashes with them, burying the remains or paying for a niche. The Grace family, she said, did none of those.

“Over the years, families have just left them,” Nelson said. “We really have no alternative than to at least give them a common burial. We don’t charge families to do that, we just do it because we don’t have any alternative. We’re keeping it there and taking care of the remains.”

When Sandra Grace’s other son, Kirk William Turner, died last July, she wanted to bury the two brothers, who never knew each other, together, according to the suit.

“They were appalled when the vault was opened to find a number of flimsy cardboard boxes,” their attorney, Jeffrey Milman, said. “Some were marked, some were poorly marked. It was a hodgepodge.”

The funeral home employees brushed together some of the ashes and handed them to the family in an unmarked box, according to the complaint filed in Orange County Superior Court in Santa Ana.

“They said, ‘Here, why don’t you take these?’ It obviously was not her son,” Milman said. “She was stunned.”

Melrose Abbey offered to attach a nameplate to the crypt to serve as headstone for the ashes. The funeral home also buried Grace’s other son for free. Though the family had not paid for the storage of the son’s ashes, Milman said, they had established a verbal agreement, trusting that the remains would be handled in a dignified manner.

The family is seeking an undisclosed amount of damages for emotional and physical distress.